Sometimes we need to quit, in order to begin.

I’ve loved it with every part of my heart and soul. Even when the travel ground my body down. Even when I had to cut way back and find new ways to teach.

I don’t always love it anymore. There are still parts that feed me: I taught at a conference recently and connecting my magic with the thoughts and efforts of the people there was just wonderful. We worked together. We discussed. We meditated. We dropped deep. We raised power.

What I don’t love is the constancy of being at the center of the circle. I was willing to do it for a long time – knowing how to nurture my introverted self in order to counterbalance the publicness of the rest of my life. I started to feel, as I’ve recently learned to put it, sunburned. Overexposed. Tired. Over the past few years, I’ve made shift after shift, searching for the right way, for the thing that would feel sustainable and true again.

Finally, two things happened:

First, a character dropped a sentence in my head when I was looking out the window one day. The thought was so clearly not mine that it startled me. I asked, “Where did that come from?” And he was there: a man sitting, depressed in his chair, bereft because his best friend had just died. From that thought came my novel, “Like Water” which will be published in May.

Fiction, a thing I had practiced and poked at for years before finally giving up on it, came roaring back into my life. I’ve saved money to take classes. I’ve rearranged my flexible time in order to write, study, and learn. Even afternoons when I’m struggling with a story, it feels deeply satisfying. I love it.

Second, the new Civil Rights Movement finally caught hold because of some determined young people in Ferguson Missouri. Years of organizing that often felt like it was going nowhere suddenly had a place to go. Energy to attach to. Excitement.

I had taken a break from in-the-streets type activism for a long time before getting sucked back in by Occupy. In my awareness, Occupy was sandwiched between the local killings of Oscar Grant and Alan Blueford. The systems of police brutality that I knew of, abstractly, were hitting home. I started organizing how I could, with whom I could, but nothing quite took. Meetings felt like a slog, even when I liked the people. These days, I now have a group to work with that has a lot of forward momentum. I leave meetings feeling energized, and like I want to spend the time. More time.

I have re-evaluated what I love.

I don’t love my weekly blogging anymore – you’ll notice it hasn’t been weekly these past few months, with so much of my energy going to fiction and writing about justice issues. I don’t love teaching weekend workshops and have taken them off my calendar for now. What I love right now is teaching in small bites of a few hours, or in online classes, or with groups that are really studying and teaching themselves, with my input. And I love mentoring people who are stepping into leadership and teaching.

I’m still a priest. I’m still head of the Temple. But I’m so happy to be sharing power with a wider variety of people now, and seeing what new things will grow. This is what it has all been for – building systems to better share the power, and helping others to come into their own work.

I’ll still blog sometimes. Perhaps monthly. But mostly, I’ve said what I want to say for awhile, on the topic of spiritual practice. I hope to collect some of my essays in themed groupings for Solar Cross to publish in the coming year or two. Despite my published books, there is so much I’ve written that exists only in the dusty pixels of the internet, including answers to questions I still get asked. I’ll still teach things that feel deeply interesting to me, or useful to the community.

I’m continuing to offer spiritual direction one on one because that still feels like a calling, and very satisfying to my soul.

I’ll continue doing all the needed work to keep Solar Cross Temple fulfilling its mandate of worship, education, and justice. We have a truly kick ass board that is excited to work on all of this, too.

I’ll be bringing them out as collections soon, for those who want to read them on their phones or Kindles, or in paper. My writing is getting better and better as I work and study, making me feel excited for the stories yet to come.

And I hope you’ll buy my first completed novel when it comes out in May. It is dedicated to Alan Blueford and it means a lot to me.

Love to all of you who continue to support my work of bringing some light, and love, and justice to this world. I’m with you in your work, whatever that may be. I stand firmly behind the work I wrote about in all of the books I’ve published so far, and:

I believe that we can make magic, together, and repair this gorgeous world.

See you on Facebook and Twitter every day, and see you here and on Patheos when thoughts strike. Let's keep checking in.

Solar Cross Presents are a series of community classes. I hope you join us in building stronger, more flexible, more sustainable leadership and communities.

I'll be starting a new Crafting Spiritual Evolution elemental series online with some wonderful student teachers I've been mentoring. These are all long-term students of mine who've been doing this very work for many years. We will support one another with weekly homework, online discussions, and video chats.

If you had to write a mission statement, what might it be? And how does everything else in your life support, undermine, or avoid this?

I ask because too many of us are still uncertain of direction, or we are living fragmented lives. We speak one thing here, and there, we act in a way that contradicts our speech. We’ve lost our way. We are going through the motions. We’ve forgotten our connection to the Gods.

Sometimes we’ve had it. We have known. We’ve sensed the power in our core and used that to help us steer our way through life. But then work got in the way. Or illness. Or children. Or our practices became automatic, done by rote instead of with intention. Or we simply forgot that our words and actions needed to support one another.

I’ve written whole books on this topic, but sometimes it needs re-stating in simpler form:

The arcs of our lives must be contiguous.

Our smallest actions affect our largest intention.

We can start again today.

Let’s look again at the question that began this post:

1/What is your mission statement? In other words: what is your intention, whether for the next six months, or six years, or your life?

2/ Does your life as it is now support your mission, or what I call the Large Arc of Your Intention?

Does your life as it is now undermine this?

In what ways do your thoughts, practices, or actions avoid this your mission, your intention, or your Will?

Every one of us needs to revisit these questions. No one is immune from the need to do an inventory of one’s life: Not the great mage, not the priestess, not the teacher, the Adept, the activist, or the person just trying to get through the day.

We can live in right relationship to all parts of self, and all parts of life.

No matter how long we’ve been doing it, our practice starts again today.

A gathering of 2500 practitioners of Pagan, polytheist and magical traditions in San Jose, California.

Monday morning, after a very full weekend, we packed up our hotel room and went to the cold, carpeted ballroom to set up chairs into two Vesicae Piscis, each holding the other in gentle arcs. A microphone was set up in the center of the room.

The Pagans of Color Caucus had taken the opportunity afforded by Pantheacon staff who suggested they use this space vacated by a canceled workshop to offer “Creating Brave Spaces for People of Color.” It was needed.

People trickled in, taking their seats. Some words of welcome and explanation were said. And then one of the most potent rituals I’ve ever had the privilege to be part of began.

It was the beginning of the Telling of Truth.

The sort of telling of truth that must occur before there can be any talk of reconciliation. I’ve said many times that before there can be peace, there must be justice. The corollary is this: before there can be reconciliation or healing, there must be truth.

People shouted. People raged. Some spoke so quietly it was hard to hear them. Many others wept. Most of us wept. Stories were told. Opinions offered. One person was angrily challenged in the midst of palpable grief. And after two hours, the Pagans of Color stood in the center as white allies circled around to hold and bear witness. The names of the dead were recited. Loud screams of sorrow and rage cut through the air. And then, more names were sobbed out. And these words, repeated over and over, from a raw and burning throat: “I see you. I hear you. I know you. I love you.” And to the white people bearing witness: “See us. Hear us. Know us. Love us.”

We see you. We hear you. We know you. We love you.

Then we sang.

This was a weekend filled with more instances of racism than I can even recount to you: white people’s swastikas defended, Jewish bankers decried by a workshops attendee, (1) a presenter saying, “it is good to learn Spanish for talking to workers,” a Pilipina told that “Paganism is European indigenous religion" and not for her, people walking by the Pagans of Color suite every hour or two, hissing “racists!”,white people drunkenly insisting they don’t need to understand privilege, a misguided attempt at satire being taken seriously enough that a few people actually wanted to take a workshop on how to avoid the topic of racism…(2)

These are but a handful of the incidents that occurred. I also saw many other forms of simple disrespect leveled at my sisters, brothers, and siblings by white people who should know better. By the time the Pagans of Color Caucus was meeting Sunday night, things had gotten so bad that a group of allies offered to stand outside the doors to make sure nothing interrupted the meeting. (3)

Some Allies at Pcon 2015 pic by Stephanie Del Kjer

And in and around all of this, Con happened. I know that great workshops and rituals were had by many people. I feel amazingly privileged to have facilitated and participated in the panels that I did. The one workshop I was able to attend – Rhyd Wildermuth and Alley Valkyrie’s “Gods and Radicals” – was fantastic and needs several days of conversations for follow up. But I felt like I was in my own Con: a convention of confronting racism. Of sharing food and drink and building alliances with those who are most affected by injustice, and with those who pledge to actively stand against it.

I saw it this year. I really saw it: the things my Black and brown comrades face daily, but mostly don’t talk about because what white person would believe that things really are this bad?

Meanwhile, every 28 hours a person of color is killed by police or security forces in the US. In the US, every week so far this year, a trans woman of color has been murdered. So many people have been killed just since Mike Brown’s death that I have stopped keeping track. And those are just the ones that come through my feed from the people I organize with locally. I know there are more that never even surface in my awareness.

And yet some white people need more stories to hear just how crushing daily racism is to our Black and brown neighbors and co-religionists. Some white people want personal attention around how badly they feel when asked to confront their own privilege.

We need to start paying better attention.

We need to cultivate a vision of the world we want to build, and that has to include a deeper understanding of the one we all currently inhabit, not just our own small bubble within that world.

The weekend was intense – after the uprising began in Ferguson, and the further escalation of overt racism in the country began, I knew it would be. After statements and non-statements, and out and out silence on the subject of police terror and the slaughter of African Americans, after the relegating of this scourge as a “cause du jour” by some Pagan leaders despite the fact that some of us have been working on these issues for years, I knew what was coming. I had prepared for this, clearing my schedule of all but moderating and sitting on panels that dealt with necessary change: one on nurturing younger leaders, one on bringing race to the table, and one on cultural appropriation.

Our whole Temple board had prepared for the weekend knowing that we would need to be strong and present for those who would need support, including one another.

The week before Con, someone quipped on Twitter: “It’s four days until Pantheacon and participants are already preparing to take umbrage at something.” Another dismissal. As though standing up for trans inclusion two years in a row was a trifle. And as if the issue of racism in Paganism wasn’t already quite clearly set to be one unstated theme of this year’s PantheaCon.

Several people asked why I wasn’t teaching classes or leading ritual as usual. They missed me on the schedule. I replied that my work this weekend was with the panels. After the very moving “Honoring or Appropriation” panel – which I hope you listen to when it is up on Elemental Castings – one of these people folded me into a deep hug. He said he now realized that this panel was as big a teaching as I have ever offered. He understood now why I wasn’t teaching my usual classes.

This too, is part of the Great Work.

Honoring or Appropriationpic by Stephanie Del Kjer

PantheaCon 2015 was filled with joy, laughter, camaraderie, community, and gratitude as well as physical pain from a minor injury I sustained mere days before. Mostly though? PantheaCon 2015 was underscored by my sense of anger. Anger so wide and deep that by the end, I was back to the states I inhabited so often in my youth: wishing to punch things while remaining perfectly still inside and out. Wishing to punch things, while finding my center and calling on my Gods. Wishing to punch things while offering calm explanations, a compassionate ear, or shoulders to cry upon. Wishing to weep, in the midst of great love.

I’m eternally grateful to those who are taking active leadership during these times of foment.

I'm taking steps to continue organizing with groups and individuals who are committed to building a culture based on love, equity, and justice. I hope that you will join us in this sacred task.

In the middle of the Honoring or Appropriation panel, I paused the hundreds sitting in the ballroom and asked us all to breathe and call upon Compassion and Anger.

I seem to be walking with them still.

And yet, there is also joy in my heart, and joy on the faces of my friends. So I leave you with a few pictures of that joy, taken at Pantheacon 2015.

The sharing of joy is as important as telling our truths to one another.

(1) Late Edit: This originally read "Jewish bankers decried in workshops" which could possibly be read as being done by a presenter. It was a workshop attendee who talked about Jews and the monetary system, and international conspiracy. That sort of speech is often shortened to being described as talk of "Jewish bankers."

(2) Late edit: The authors of the item posted a very thoughtful apology in the comments of the linked blog.

(3)Addendum for clarity: The Sunday evening Caucus was a meeting already on the Con schedule and was separate from the Monday morning meeting I speak of at the beginning of this piece, which was added to the schedule after various events on Saturday upset many Pagans of Color and white Pagans. At the Bringing Race to the Table panel Saturday, it was decided that people wanted more time to process. Con gave this to us all with the Monday slot.

Also, ConOps had offered security for the Sunday eve meeting, but knowing how busy they are, allies stepped up and offered to stand watch. ConOps checked in with us on this, and I believe there was a Con staffer on duty inside the door as well.

I want to thank those on Pantheacon staff and leadership – particularly Jaimie – who really stepped up around issues of race: making space, offering support and security, taking complaints, and making clear there is a zero tolerance policy for racist behavior at Con.

A small group of Pagans, including Solar Cross Temple, have launched Pagans Against Racism as a community resource. Please make us of it.

Solar Cross Temple is starting a series of online community classes on leadership, restorative justice, psychology, and other topics in March. Not listed yet but in the works are also classes on unlearning racism and becoming better allies in the struggle for justice.

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I honor so many people: Aine, Xochiquetzal, Crystal, Ryan, Robert, Jonathan, Sophia, Jaimie, Elena, Brennos, Morpheus, Patrick...and all the others showing up to help build coalitions of support.

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Crystal Blanton & T. Thorn Coyle, Pcon 2015pic by Stephanie Del Kjer

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To those concerned about my walking with a cane during Con: I had a training injury – while exercising Monday before Con, I leapt over a giant tire, slightly missed, and landed with full weight on the top side of my foot – I'm healing rapidly and well. Thank you.

]]>http://www.thorncoyle.com/blog/2015/02/18/truth-joy-pcon-2015/feed/54Mourning Muslim Liveshttp://www.thorncoyle.com/blog/2015/02/11/mourning-muslim-lives/
http://www.thorncoyle.com/blog/2015/02/11/mourning-muslim-lives/#commentsWed, 11 Feb 2015 20:47:58 +0000http://www.thorncoyle.com/?p=5552Continued]]>More than once since yesterday, I have started a post on the three Muslim students killed in North Carolina: Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, age 21, her husband, 23-year-old Deah Shaddy Barakat, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, age 19.

I mourn for their lives and feel grief and sorrow at our xenophobic, hate-filled country.

When looking up their names, I began to Google "Muslims killed in NC." As soon as I got to "Muslims kill" Google autofilled the phrase to "Muslims killing Christians."

And that, my friends, starkly illustrates the problem:

Our thoughts go too quickly toward such the demonization of that which we see as "Other". We dehumanize our brothers, sisters, and siblings. We spit on or harass one another. We send in troops, and drop bombs from the sky. More and more of us end up cast out, alienated, or, like this young family, dead.

Today I pray that we learn, to quote Assata Shakur, that we must "love each other and support each other."

Until then, we are not free.

How do we learn? By shifting our faces toward love. By being reminders to one another, in speech and action, that hatred diminishes us all.

We learn practicing as often as we can.

Edit: You may wish to read this account from Yusor's best friend, Amira Ata:

]]>http://www.thorncoyle.com/blog/2015/02/11/mourning-muslim-lives/feed/5Expand Your Perspectivehttp://www.thorncoyle.com/blog/2015/02/06/expand-perspective/
http://www.thorncoyle.com/blog/2015/02/06/expand-perspective/#commentsFri, 06 Feb 2015 21:23:58 +0000http://www.thorncoyle.com/?p=5542Continued]]>During meditation at my altar this week, after bowing to the ancestors, lighting my devotional candle, and offering incense, I settled into center, allowing the tensions around me to relax. I opened.

In this opening, I was reminded of something that I know deep in my being, yet still sometimes forget:

There is a spaciousness of billions of years around my life. There is a spaciousness of billions of years around every life on earth. We can take a longer breath, for the whole cosmos is breathing.

It is easy to get caught up in our tensions. It is easy to only be engaged in the struggle: to feed ourselves and our families, to pay our rent or mortgage, to fight against the violations of water, sky, and soil, to stand against greed, to fight against fracking or for clean drinking water, to say that the lives of those killed in the streets have value, and that their families are not alone in their grief.

These struggles are important. They are vital. They are also not the only things to pay attention to.

We need to make offerings to our struggles.

We need to give them more space, and a reminder that they have a place that they belong.

When my clients are in a big life transition, when fear, anger, uncertainty or grief has them in a tightening grip, I often remind them to re-center, and then to allow themselves to grow bigger, to expand.

So simple. Take a breath. Upon the exhalation, allow attention to descend into the center of gravity coiled within the belly. Then breathe into that center, allowing the exhaled breath to gently expand the sense of spaciousness around the whole body, giving the difficult emotions more space in which to be.

We all need more space in which to be. We don’t get that by consuming more land, or goods, or money. We don’t get that by filling up our time.

We get more space by slowing down inside, exhaling outward, relaxing our edges enough that we can stretch. Settle. Breathe some more.

Carrying high tension doesn’t help us get more done, it only increases our sense of panic or discomfort.

Carrying high tension causes us to forget this truth: we are connected to the larger flow of time. Our current problem – important as it is to face – isn’t forever.

When I start to constrict around the emergency of extrajudicial killings of my Black and brown brothers, sisters and siblings, I can return to the centering altar and remember:

I’m part of a 20 billion year arc of Being. We all are.

I still need to show up to the daily struggle, but if I do so in this larger context, my body, mind, and spirit feel looser, more relaxed, and therefore better able to engage for longer periods of time. Forgetting the longer arc can wear us out.

Remembering that we are engaged in a flow of life and death and change so vast our minds cannot contain it serves as a reminder: We don’t have to know it all, because we can’t. All we can do is try our best right now. We can let the rest go. We have to.

Grief, anger, sorrow, or frustration can still fuel your struggle, but you can struggle equipped with a bit more power and ease. That will help us all.

Your life – and whatever you struggle with – is part of a larger whole. Open out. Take up more space. You are surrounded by the great unfolding of space and time.

I think that’s pretty grand.

Some of my spiritual direction clients have graduated. They’ve gotten what they needed, integrating the work we’ve done into their lives. This happy fact means that I have some spaces available for new clients if you wish some help navigating some spiritual questions or changes.

Last night, arriving home after doing my civic duty at a public hearing
regarding fourteen activists facing a $70,000 fine for chaining themselves to our local transit system on Black Friday, a friend pointed me to a piece that, among many other things, said that one should not ask Pagan organizations to take stands on racial justice, as it is just a “cause du jour.”

I decided to respond this morning and thought the points I made might be good for many of us to think on and dialog about. Here is my comment, edited so that it applies to the broader situation:

“We must look at our world as it is, and it is a desperate and painful ordeal to undergo. Yet the pain of the world is what we are masking by accepting the false dreams of our fallen empire whose jaws still devour even those in its death throes. Before dream we must open our eyes, and wash them clean.”

That is from Apocalyptic Witchcraft by Peter Grey. In that book, he clearly asks us to work both in the shadow and in full sunlight. He asks us to engage, deeply.

My magic works both in the mysterious realms and in the manifest world. Oftentimes the two overlap. Separating spirit and matter is a trap. And yes, it is a trap often made by certain Christian sects. It seems to me that we can also fall into this trap, in saying that religious organizations should not speak to their members on troubles of the times.

If spirit and matter are conjoined, interpenetrating, not separate, then how should my spirituality not have a care for justice? How should I not care that people get fed, clothed, housed? That Nature of which we are a part is not raped and trampled? How should I not care that together, we’ve built systems of such shocking inequity that government employees regularly beat, harass, rape, and kill members of society with impunity?

Should a religious organization not have a care for the welfare of its members? Isn’t that part of its mandate? For example, Pagan and other religious groups have spoken out in favor of marriage equality. Why shouldn’t Pagan and other religious groups also speak on racial injustice? Both directly affect their members. Choosing to speak on one sets a precedent to speak on the other.

My religion is never about morality. My religion deals with ethics. My religion –like so many Gods and Goddesses do– deals with justice.

Peter Grey wrote: “Love is the war to end all wars, and the war is upon us.”

I know where I’m standing.

How about you? What are your thoughts on the role of your religious or spiritual organization in taking stands? Should religious people or organizations be engaged in civic life? Are you? In what ways?

It was an October day and I was standing in the sunny courtyard, eating soup, when I greeted him.

I’ve known him for at least fifteen years. He looked terrible. Simply terrible. Like whatever had been holding him together before had given up and walked away.

He was glad to see me, and opened his arms. We hugged, me trying to keep the soup bowl out of the way, and doing my “turn one shoulder slightly toward the person” so as to not get full body contact. As a person in a female presenting body, it’s how I hug people on the street.

I hugged him, even though he was filthy, and I would rather be clean. I hugged him even though, as an introvert, I’m not always very big on hugs.

I hugged him because I am never sure when anyone last touched him in kindness.

I hugged him as an act of mercy for us both, because I want to live in a world where everyone gets touched in kindness sometimes.

I was there at the soup kitchen – aka the House of Hospitality – because in a just world, hungry people are fed.

Kindness and justice can walk hand in hand, though that is not always the case. The possibility is always there, in every interaction.

"All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people." – Ursula Le Guin

2014 has been a hard year for many: One of economic struggle, death, illness, and social upheaval and pain. I hope there has also been a lot of joy in 2014, and creativity, and love. I know there has been in my own life, but I’ve also keenly felt the pain and dis-ease around me.

What I hope is that for 2015 – which is already looking to be another challenging yet fruitful year – we spark up our imaginations. That we wheel the creaky machinery out, dust it off, clean it, oil it, re-calibrate it, and set it running again.

I posted the Le Guin quote on Facebook this week, and someone disagreed with it, saying “We just need to return to the imagination we had as kids.”

That is often easier said than done.

I think we get trained out of imagination and we need examples from other imaginative people to help us find our way toward it again.

We get taught imagination by reading, for one. We get taught imagination –or I do, at least– by listening to people like Neil deGrasse Tyson. We get taught imagination by daring to work magic…

Children have big imaginations partially because they haven't been trained out of it. More importantly, though, they can still make things up because they aren't yet bogged down by a bunch of their own lived stories. Stories that often tell them: "You can't." or "That's not sensible" or "You'll get your heart broken." or "The world doesn't work that way."

The ancient Greeks believed that imagination was a real thing. It wasn’t just “make believe” the way we might put it, though if we think about it, imagination is then, the making up of beliefs. An affirming that “I want this to be so.” For the ancient Greeks, those thoughts already existed, they were Forms, and our minds, and then our hearts and hands, brought them into matter.

What do you want to make matter in 2015?

I want to make art and stories matter. I want to imagine a world of lightness, creativity, and truth. I want visionary dreams arising from the darkness.I want caring to matter. I want kindness to matter. I want fierce righteousness to matter. I want to make love and justice matter.

Please tell me, what would you like to imagine for the coming year? What sort of life and world would you manifest?

Sometimes we need to slow down and notice more. Sometimes we need to let things go. Sometimes we need to tap back into the flow. Sometimes we need to be with an expanded sense of what is.

This morning, I checked in on my students, including those who are currently working through Make Magic of Your Life. We are studying Desire and how it flows through the Four Powers of the Sphinx.

One student confessed to feeling behind. Here was my response:

Working through the Four Powers –To Know. To Will. To Dare. To Keep Silence.– is cyclical.

This isn't a one time journey. We can make these cycles as small as a day and as long as several years, and there are cycles within cycles. Give yourself permission to Know Will Dare and Keep Silence every day. Then give yourself permission to be with these Powers for the long term.

As always, our most basic practices support this. It is in getting too far from what we know to be true - that we need to show up for ourselves and not only go through the motions of practice, but tap into the connection that these practices offer.

So I ask you: what in you feels behind?

Can you allow yourself to get back to the most basic things that support your life?

Can you remember that every day you can access your ability to listen, sense, and Know? Can you remember that every day you can set intention into action and Will? Can you remember that even seemingly small things can require the heart to Dare? Can you sink back into center, breathe, and open to the wisdom that arises from Silence?

Find a way to root into your life, into your self, into your work, into your practices, and into your community.

And then:

Allow yourself to love.

Allow yourself to flow.

Allow yourself to curl up into silence.

Allow yourself to reach out toward the sun.

Ask: What do I need, right now? What is my heart and soul longing for?